Clever, but unprincipled

Monday, October 12, 2009
Smart grids

by Biodun Iginla, Technology Analyst for the BBC and the Economist

Oct 8th 2009
From The Economist print edition
When it comes to greening the world’s energy supply, technology is not a substitute for policy

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AMERICA wants one. So do Australia, Brazil, Britain, China, Germany, Italy and Japan, to name a few. Even Malta is building one. Big utilities, such as Electricité de France and American Electric Power, are keen. So are industrial heavyweights such as GE and Siemens, and computing giants including Cisco Systems, Google, IBM and Microsoft. Al Gore and other environmentalists are ardent advocates. So are dyed-in-the-wool capitalists such as T. Boone Pickens. Endless surveys suggest that consumers would embrace them enthusiastically. Barack Obama is a big fan: he rated them as one of the highlights of America’s stimulus bill, which lavished $3.9 billion on them. Businesses, sensing an opportunity, are investing with alacrity (see article). No one, it seems, has a bad word to say about smart grids.

That is partly because no one is quite sure what they are—and because “smart” sounds preferable to “dumb”. The term encompasses almost anything that would make power transmission more reliable, flexible and convenient, from meters that send in readings automatically to software that detects snapped cables and reroutes power supplies around them.

The world’s grids will certainly need some clever upgrades to manage the intermittent surges of electricity from the millions of wind turbines and solar panels that are planned to ward off the threat of global warming. If distributed generation (meaning small power sources such as rooftop solar arrays) becomes widespread, more sophisticated technology will be required to allow power to flow out from homes and offices as well as into them. That would also allow the batteries of electric cars to serve as a backup supply of power when needed. Technophiles imagine a time when smart grids will seamlessly balance supply and demand for power by turning down millions of air-conditioners a notch when the wind drops or the sun goes behind a cloud.

Increasing the grid’s IQ would bring more mundane benefits, too. Blackouts, which cost businesses billions each year, would become much rarer. Smarter meters could encourage conservation by letting customers know just how much power they are using, with which machines, at what cost, every minute of the day. Terrorists should find it harder to disrupt things. As Mr Obama put it when urging Congress to pass the stimulus bill, a smart grid “will save us money, protect our power sources from blackout or attack, and deliver clean, alternative forms of energy to every corner of our nation.”

Spending lots of money on smart grids, however, will not bring about any of those things by itself. The technology is not inherently frugal or green. It can be used to deliver not just clean renewable energy more efficiently, but also the grubby coal-fired sort. By reducing the need for expensive backup capacity, it may actually reduce the cost of electricity, and so encourage consumption. The very fact that utilities and their customers, tree-huggers and industrialists alike are all keen on it hints at the many different ends to which it can be turned.
Smartening up the rules

Moreover, the biggest impediment to the spread of renewables in most countries is not an antiquated grid, but the lack of a price on carbon. Consumers waste power not just because they cannot regulate their spending very precisely, but also because it often does not cost very much. Most utilities have an incentive to sell as much power as they can, dirty or clean.

In short, smart grids are not a substitute for a proper energy policy. Mr Obama and other politicians will still need to put in place regulations that encourage investment in energy efficiency and cleaner forms of generation—almost certainly meaning higher bills, however smart the grid. That, naturally, will be a lot less popular than a miraculous technical fix.

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Advertisement Posted by BiodunIginla at 3:08 AM Labels: bbc news. biodun iginla, green issues, technology, the economist

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